SoberLine Review: What It Does and What It Doesn't

This is a SoberLine review written by the people who built SoberLine, which is a conflict of interest, so it is organised around the questions people actually ask before paying rather than the ones we would enjoy answering. If you want a version with rivals in it, we also wrote an honest comparison of the sobriety apps worth considering — including the two that will do more for you for free. If you already know what you want, SoberLine is on the App Store.

Is SoberLine free?

Free to download and free to try. The whole app is open when you start — the counter, the Panic Button, the 30-day path, the community, all of it. Nothing is held back behind a higher tier or drip-fed to you over the first week.

Everything below is what you actually get, followed by the things it deliberately does not do. The full terms are in our terms of use.

What SoberLine actually does

It is built around one idea: a day counter is useless at the moment you most need help. So the centre of the app is a 24/7 Panic Button — one tap gives you guided 4-4-4 breathing, urge surfing, your own written reasons for stopping, and distraction games designed to occupy the three to ten minutes a craving lasts.

Around it sits the tracking: a live day counter, a Recovery Tree that grows with your dry days, a money-saved total based on the spending you entered, a seven-stage health timeline and 22 milestones. Plus a 30-day path in three phases with daily lessons and journaling, a habit tracker aimed at the evening drinking ritual, a craving log that surfaces your triggers, one-tap texting to a support person, and an anonymous community.

Two design decisions are worth calling out because they are unusual. First, it handles both goals: quit completely, or set a daily limit and count alcohol-free days, switchable in Settings. Second, a slip restarts the day counter but keeps everything else — milestones, savings and history stay. You are not starting over.

What SoberLine does not do

Being straight about the limits is the whole point of a page like this.

• It is not treatment. No clinicians, no therapy, no medication management, no medical supervision. It is a wellness tool and it does not pretend to be anything else.
• There is no Android version. iPhone and iPad only, iOS 16.4 or later. We are not going to promise you a date.
• No live coaching or human meetings. The community is anonymous and asynchronous. If you want scheduled group sessions with a certified coach, other apps do that and we do not.
• The money figure is your own number. It is based on the spending you entered during onboarding, in USD. It is a reflection of what you told it, not an independent measurement.
• It cannot keep you sober. It gives structure and something to hold at 9 p.m. The plan is still yours to build.

Who it suits, and who it does not

Worth being blunt, because the wrong fit is nobody's win.

• It suits you if the evenings are the problem. The whole app is built around having something to do at the crest of an urge, rather than a number to look at afterwards. If your difficulty is the 9 p.m. hour, that is the axis we chose.
• It suits you if you are not sure you are quitting. Cut-down mode is a first-class path, not a consolation setting — run a daily limit and count alcohol-free days instead of a streak, and switch later if you want to.
• It suits you if you have slipped before and it wrecked you. The relapse behaviour is a deliberate design decision: the counter restarts, the record does not. If losing a streak is what made you delete a tracker before, that matters more than any feature list.
• It does not suit you if what you need is people. The community here is anonymous and asynchronous. If you need a room with faces in it, a support group will do more for you than we will, and we would rather you went.
• It does not suit you if you are on Android. Nothing we can do about that today.

Privacy

You can use SoberLine anonymously — no real name required, and the community is anonymous by design. We do not sell your information, and you can export or delete it. The specifics are in the privacy policy.

What it looks like

The tracking side of the app, which is what most people open it for on a normal day:

A live sober day counter, down to the hour

Money saved, based on the spending figure you entered

A seven-stage health recovery timeline and 22 milestones

A craving log that surfaces the triggers behind your urges

Frequently asked questions

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